Trump’s Conspiracy Theories Could Hurt GOP In Georgia : Consider This from NPR

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Less than two months from now, the Republican Party will lose control of one branch of government – the White House.

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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #1: (Chanting) U.S.A. U.S.A. U.S.A.

CORNISH: The question for the party between now and then is whether they lose control of a second branch.

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MISSY LANDERS: I mean, I’ve always voted and things like that, but I think we need to know what’s going on.

CORNISH: Missy Landers was one of hundreds of Trump supporters who recently showed up at an Atlanta rally to protest the results of the 2020 election – because election season is not over in Georgia. The state holds a Senate runoff election on January 5, with two U.S. Senate seats up for grabs. If Republicans lose both, they lose control of the Senate, and Democrats will lead Congress. So they need voters like Missy Landers to show up.

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LANDERS: With all of the news about the ballots, the vote, the electronic systems, all the different things that happened during the election and is continuing to come out – but I don’t feel secure about it.

CORNISH: One reason some of the president’s supporters in Georgia feel this way – they’re being told to.

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SIDNEY POWELL: I think I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all until your vote is secure.

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CORNISH: That was pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell at a Stop the Steal rally in Georgia this week.

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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #2: (Chanting) Stop the steal. Stop the steal.

CORNISH: Powell, along with the president and his allies, have now spent nearly a month selling supporters on an alternate reality of rigged elections and stolen votes. The result – well, listen to this exchange with GOP chair Ronna McDaniel, also at a rally in Georgia this past week.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: How are we going to give money and work when it’s already decided?

CORNISH: So someone in the crowd asks, how are we going to give money and work when the election is already decided?

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RONNA MCDANIEL: It’s not decided. This is the key. It’s not decided. First of all…

CORNISH: CONSIDER THIS – there’s a saying in politics. If you’re explaining, you’re losing. And what Trump supporters do next in Georgia could have big consequences for the Republican Party and its traditional media allies. From NPR, I’m Audie Cornish. It’s Thursday, December 3.

Hi, folks. It’s Audie, and we’re working on an upcoming episode about how 2020 has tested our relationships. Whether that’s with family or friends or partners or roommates, we want to hear from you. And if you have a question about how to navigate a relationship right now, just record yourself and email that audio file to us at considerthis@npr.org. Try to keep your question to about a minute. Maybe all this time stuck at home with your friends is driving you up the wall, or maybe a long-distance romance has been put to the test. Whatever it is, we want to help out. Again, just record your question and email the audio to considerthis@npr.org. And thanks.

It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. For some Republican officials in Georgia, trust in the process is not their only concern.

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GABRIEL STERLING: Good afternoon. My name is Gabriel Sterling. I’m the voting system implementation manager for the state of Georgia.

CORNISH: At a press conference this week, Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw Georgia’s election, was irate.

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STERLING: At the beginning of this, I’m going to do my best to keep it together because it all gone too far – all of it.

CORNISH: Sterling was talking about allies of the president, even former members of his legal team, calling for state and federal election officials to be shot, tried for treason.

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STERLING: A 20-something tech in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out saying he should be hung for treason because he was transferring a report on batches from an EMS to a county computer so he could read it. It has to stop.

CORNISH: Sterling, a lifelong Republican, spoke directly to the president.

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STERLING: Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up. And if you’re going to take a position of leadership, show some.

CORNISH: Sterling said he’s got police protection outside of his house. Other state officials and their families are receiving threats, and he’s worried the violent rhetoric could lead to actual violence. Trump did respond on Twitter but just reiterated the same baseless claims.

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STERLING: Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed. And it’s not right.

CORNISH: A day after he made those remarks, Gabriel Sterling explained to NPR why he needed to say what he said. He spoke with Ari Shapiro.

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ARI SHAPIRO: These conspiracy theories and threats have been going on since the election. What was the final straw that prompted you to speak out so forcefully yesterday?

STERLING: Well, a building frustration over time because it has been like playing a game of whack-a-mole. With every new conspiracy theory that gets put up, we got to whack down. And it kept on coming from the president’s attorneys, who are now not his attorneys. And we saw kind of a rising level of, you know, language of violence around things and even death threats against my boss, Secretary Brad Raffensperger, sexualized threats to his wife on her personal cellphone and threats against me.

But, you know, secretary – he ran for office. You kind of expect that. I took a higher-profile position explaining things, so you kind of accept that to a degree. But when I found out that there was a young contractor, you know, mid-20s, who just took a job as a tech working in elections just trying to do his work and do his job – that he did an innocent thing of making a report from one computer to another. And then these conspiracy theorists took this video online, found his name. It’s a unique name, so they found his family, started harassing them. And two or three tweets down from the original video tweet where they say he’s manipulating voter data, somebody said, you’ve committed treason; may God have mercy on your soul, with a swinging noose on the GIF. And at that point, I was pretty much done. That was it.

SHAPIRO: Now, you’ve called on elected leaders to put a stop to this. But today a lawyer who was previously associated with the Trump campaign, Sidney Powell, held an event with hundreds of people in Georgia where she urged them to hound the governor and not to vote in the January runoff. So even if President Trump and Georgia’s Republican senators did start to speak out against this, is it too late to put the genie back in the bottle?

STERLING: Frankly, Ari, I don’t know. All we can do is tell the truth, follow the law and do our jobs. Sidney Powell at this point has been so discredited and debunked. I’m surprised she hasn’t been laughed – well, she has. Essentially every court challenge they brought has been laughed out of the courtroom. She is still clinging to the fact that there is some secret algorithm or some fractional voting that took the votes away from the president – zero proof. In our state, we literally did a hand count of 5 million ballots to show that these scanners were correct in showing that the president was down by about 13,000 votes almost, and it came out almost exactly the same. So it’s insane. It’s just insane.

SHAPIRO: And Georgia’s senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue – both Republicans – are in campaign mode ahead of the January runoff. You scolded them for making unfounded claims about Georgia’s election integrity. Have you had private conversations with them or their staff about the impact of their remarks?

STERLING: I have not. And I am a Republican. That’s one of the things about this that makes it so frustrating. And I will still vote for them because some things are bigger than this, but I – when they called for the secretary to resign based on his lack of transparency, we were literally having two press conferences a day and putting out press releases, you know, hourly about how the counts were going. It’s just – they are in campaign mode. They are terrified they’re going to lose the Trump base, so they do not want to cross President Trump. So I feel bad for them that they’re kind of stuck in that terrible box of a position because if you piss off the Trump voters, in their opinion, you lose those Trump voters, and they lose in January. But by doing it, they’re lacking leadership.

SHAPIRO: Given the anger and the passion that you’re expressing and your saying they’re showing a lack of leadership, tell me about your decision to vote for them anyway.

STERLING: The future of the republic is at stake. And I, as a lifelong Republican, cannot conscience the idea of having every level of government be with the Democratic Party right now. My first Republican campaign was 1985 for Senator Mack Mattingly’s reelection. We lost. I’ve been fighting for these values my entire life, and I’m not going to leave my party. I’m going to fight to make my party the party that it needs to be.

CORNISH: Gabe Sterling, the voting systems implementation manager for the state of Georgia. By the way, President Trump will visit the state this weekend for a rally in support of the two Republican Senate candidates there.

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CORNISH: The president’s conspiratorial denials of his own defeat have been bolstered by allies in some relatively new places.

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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #1: (Chanting) U.S.A. U.S.A. U.S.A.

CORNISH: Remember Trump supporter Missy Landers in Atlanta from the start of the episode? Well, she told reporter Lisa Hagen with NPR member station WABE where she gets her information.

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LANDERS: And I listen to Tucker Carlson, Newsmax.

LISA HAGEN: OK.

LANDERS: I love David Harris, you know, Terrence, all these guys.

CORNISH: Newsmax – that’s one of several conservative competitors now trying to outfox Fox News, where Fox News reporters are acknowledging Joe Biden’s victory. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, who’s written about and reported on right-wing media for years, has the story.

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DAVID FOLKENFLIK: Fox News has been one of the president’s chief pillars of support. Yet Fox has been pulling back, at least somewhat, from denying the outcome of the election. Take Fox’s Laura Ingraham.

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LAURA INGRAHAM: But unless the legal situation changes in a dramatic and, frankly, an unlikely manner, Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20.

FOLKENFLIK: This concession to the facts has made Trump’s true believers see red.

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RANDY QUAID: Fox News’ daytime ratings have completely collapsed.

FOLKENFLIK: President Trump retweeted the Hollywood actor-turned-right-wing conspiracy theorist Randy Quaid, reading aloud from Trump’s own tweets. One of the places Trump has been touting – the six-year-old Newsmax TV, which, much like Fox, is attacking the media as much as Democrats. The difference is now Fox is the media giant taking hits from the right, in this case from Newsmax host Greg Kelly, best known as a former Fox News personality.

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GREG KELLY: People are talking about what’s happening at Fox. Fox does seem to be going through something of an identity crisis. They’re not very supportive of the president these days. They seem to be bending over backwards to hurt him.

FOLKENFLIK: If you thought Fox gave a lot of time to Trump’s advocates making unfounded claims, at least it sometimes pushed back. Newsmax doubles down on conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims with Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and pro-Trump personalities Diamond and Silk, former Fox Nation stars who claim COVID-19 was unleashed to hurt Trump at the polls.

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DIAMOND: It don’t work like that.

SILK: Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

DIAMOND: I believe that this whole fiasco was planned, including the China virus. All of this was part of the scamdemic (ph) for this moment right here.

KURT BARDELLA: Really, it is just an audiovisual extension of Trump Twitter.

FOLKENFLIK: Kurt Bardella is a former Republican congressional staffer and Breitbart spokesman-turned-anti-Trump activist.

BARDELLA: There’s no question that this is a hundred percent opportunistic. I don’t believe that the majority of people who are part of Newsmax actually believe what they’re saying. They just see it as an opportunity to get an audience so that they can make more money.

FOLKENFLIK: Here’s Newsmax founder and CEO Christopher Ruddy, a longtime friend of Trump. Ruddy says he’s sympathetic to Trump’s claims but doesn’t actually endorse them.

CHRISTOPHER RUDDY: I don’t want to start censoring opinion people on Newsmax like I wouldn’t expect NBC to start censoring people that come on MSNBC.

FOLKENFLIK: Ruddy says Fox wrote Trump off too quickly.

RUDDY: It sounds like something ABC News would do. You know, it was an organic thing across social media and elsewhere. Take a look at Newsmax. Their coverage is more fair.

FOLKENFLIK: Newsmax is having a moment. It has become the fourth highest-rated cable news channel, and Fox’s own ratings, while still high, have fallen. For all that, Bardella tells Newsmax, enjoy your moment. He argues Ruddy is not preparing for a world after Trump.

BARDELLA: He’s acting purely as a capitalist at this point. And I do think that it’s a shortsighted approach because there is a limitation to how many people are going to be willing to change their behavior if only because Donald Trump says so.

FOLKENFLIK: There had been a lot of talk about Trump TV, about him joining Newsmax. Ruddy says that’s unlikely but is happy for the president to shine the light on his upstart network.

CORNISH: NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. And additional reporting in this episode came from Lisa Hagen with NPR member station WABE in Atlanta. It’s CONSIDER THIS from NPR. I’m Audie Cornish.

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